I used ZA Pro for ages, but when my last subscription expired I just turned the window$ firewall on instead. Granted I run through a router before connecting to the internet, as well as having a software firewall, but since then I've never had any 'issues' related to infection or instability or resource hogging. I seem to recall some versions of ZA used to add to boot time.

I liked the layout of ZA and how you could see all of the permissions and stuff, but everything seems to work ok without it :-?

Ditto for me, no problems with the Microsoft one.

I've been using Comodo for a while now, only issue I ever had was getting ICS to work properly so other PC's on my network could actually connect. No problem setting it up, but after reboot the settings seemed to have been erased, requiring everything to be set up again. Fairly anoying.

"Fixed" it by not running the internet connection through my PC, but instead to a switch and then to each individual PC. Downside is that every PC needs to run it's own protection (and no networking), but that's just minor. Never had any infections of any kind while using Comodo firewall + defense shield.

Never really made any changes to the options, when a program tries anything you get a pop-up. You can allow, block or specify a policy for it then and there.

Use Comodo. The likes of Tiny seem to be leaky. ZoneAlarm was never a good choice.

The MS one is fine if you don't care about whats going out, just whats coming in.

-S